


The Fourth Necessity

by reafterthought



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, character introspection, ffn challenge: diversity writing challenge, word count: 500-999 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 09:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28668807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reafterthought/pseuds/reafterthought
Summary: [character study] The order you learn things matters. This is a lesson Lightning learns far too late.
Relationships: Lightning & Kusanagi Jin
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: The DFC Challenge Collection





	The Fourth Necessity

**Author's Note:**

> Random thought when rewatching the Lightning arc. And, honestly, my favourite bit about VRAINS (and yugioh as a whole) is most, if not all, villains are written with enough dimension to make them theoretically or actually redeemable. And the heroes aren't all glitter and rainbows either but that's another story. :)
> 
> Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, b47 - write about losing something
> 
> Stay safe and happy 2021 everyone!

He learns about light, first.

It's a tiny speck in the large expanse he later gets to know as darkness. And that feeling of insecurity will never leave him.

He's small. Insignificant. Struggling for survival, to maintain his existence even though he doesn't know how.

And when he learns, he learns too much and too late.

But he doesn't have many options when he's born.

.

Kusanagi Jin is a bright child. A tiny speck of brightness in the dark.

Of course he mimics that. He must. It's the nature of his birth, after all. The way he exists.

The second thing he learns is that Kusanagi Jin is a bright child because he has hopes and dreams.

It's too bad he doesn't quite grasp what those two words mean until they're mangled for the both of them.

It's too bad that, by the time he learns it, it is far too late to do anything except continue down a path of destruction.

.

Kusanagi Jin is a scared and hurt child.

In retrospect, it's obvious why but for the moment, the Ignis is merely a zygote forming and the strongest experiences are one of fear and pain. So what else could possibly define him?

And, like a looping recording, he sees the embers of a child's hope battling against the ongoing reality.

It's a tug of war. A painfully ineffective tug of war. The dreams are weak. Painful. Useless. And they're not helping him win.

Winning helps. Winning gives him water and food. Winning keeps him alive.

Dreaming keeps him weak. Hope keeps him weak.

He should give it up.

But he can't make him do that.

Until he can.

.

Kusanagi Jin is a hopeful child, until he's not.

He dreams every night of his brother, his parents, of people rescuing him.

And awakes in the morning and sees cold high walls and knows he hasn't been rescued yet.

And, inevitably, he'll lose the first few duels before he can collect himself, and then sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses.

And his heart and stomach both hollow out, day by day, night by night.

And then, inexplicably – to the human child, anyway – the dreams change. People come to rescue him, kind – until they're monsters ready to devour him anew. His family reach out to him – until they're scowling, disappointed, turning away. Dreams become nightmares and there's no longer any sort of reprieve in sleep at all.

He loses constantly. And then he wins constantly.

And, unrelenting, the nightmares persist until there's only a black hole and his body like a stocking behind it.

.

Kusanagi Jin is rescued, except he's not.

The Ignis watches… and, for the first time, he sees the other children, and his own brethren. They're different, somehow. They're all looking at the children, too. They're all exhausted, thin. Some of them are crying. Some of their mouths are moving. But Jin is silent and still like a doll.

Not even a very healthy doll, even if he's clearly the most well-fed of the six of them.

He doesn't understand, at first. Aren't food and drink and sleep the only essentials?

And the children are taken away before he can learn the answer.

And the Ignis are still in their web, until they shed it three years later.

.

Of the six Ignis, he is the most flawed. He hides it well – too well, if only because they've been created by trauma and the one thing they have in abundance is personal walls. Still, the others have good qualities and their origins aren't broken without repair and he can't help but feel jealous of both of those things.

And he knows jealousy because Kusanagi Jin has an older brother. Has a smarter, stronger, more charismatic and more popular brother. And he knows jealousy can the fuel to dreams as well, because Jin wants – wanted – to be someone his brother could look up to.

But that was before shadows and monsters became both his reality and his dreams turned nightmares.

And now he has only those remnants to guide his future.

.

He does simulations, now that he's advanced that far.

But simulations only tell the future. They can't rewrite the past. And he's created his own fatal flaw with his own hands and there's no fixing that. Not without completely rewriting himself and that's a logical fallacy in itself.

In the end, he commits said logical fallacy because that's his only option, his only way out of the grave he's dug himself. He knows disappointment now, and regret, and he feels those keenly.

But he also knows dreams that are worth suffering and even though he's the one who broke Kusanagi Jin, he's not going to break like him.

He knows more, now. He understands more, now. Too late to have saved Kusanagi Jin or himself, though, so he can only complete the destruction of the two of them. And whether the humans – whether Playmaker and the dark Ignis – win or lose, he'll be free of his own chains, at least.

He, at last, understands what it means to lose all hope, a good ten years after he writes hope off as an unnecessary thing.

But amongst the necessities of life… hope is somewhere on that list as well.


End file.
